Prospecting Climatic Hazards in Whitley Strieber’s The Day After Tomorrow: An Eco- Critical Perspective

Meteorological hazards are the constant changes in the atmospheric patterns due to human alteration of the land. However, the weather processes include heat waves, cold waves, cyclones, hurricanes and freezing rain. As a matter of fact, such changes occur particularly in temperature and wind. These natural hazards caused by humans will form another ice age in future. Ice age is basically a long period of climatic shifts in the reduction of Earth atmosphere which leads to ice-melting at poles. The ice age is the coldness of global temperature, and the large areas of the earth are covered by continental ice sheets and alpine glaciers. The main objective of this study is to investigate the impact of human activities causing meteorological hazards. This study is delimited to meteorological hazards which are conceived in novel The Day After Tomorrow (hereafter The Day). The research is qualitative using Eco-critical theory to examine meteorological issues caused by human alteration of the land. Apart from the novel as primary source, secondary source includes research articles and web-based links carefully gathered to understand and analyze the story from the given theory. The textual analysis technique is used for the analysis and interpretation of the selected text with Eco-criticism as theoretical tool by William Rueckert is applied thereon. The analysis yields that meteorological issues are caused by human alteration of the land that include deforestation, burning fossil fuel, building infrastructure, transportation networks, agriculture and industrial pollution. The study further finds that meteorological hazards are the results of human pollution which has shown the massive temperature reduction in recent years as per reports of the concerned news agencies. However, we have it has been seen that scientific theories are really working to control these hazards. Therefore, humans need to be disciplined and to treat nature the way it is, rather than changing it according to their needs. Furthermore, they should remain as species rather than nation so that they may control and avert the predictable ice age.